


Murder in Mind

by shootingstarcipher



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Angst, Dark, M/M, Mental Instability, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-13
Updated: 2016-10-27
Packaged: 2018-07-23 19:01:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7476078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shootingstarcipher/pseuds/shootingstarcipher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fatal fires didn’t happen often enough. <br/>The stench of rotting corpses never reached him.<br/>Bloodstains weren’t red enough, the blood not dark enough.<br/>No matter how many families he tore apart, no matter how much of the world he watched get destroyed, he was always left craving something. Craving more.<br/>A child once asked him why he did what he did, and the demon simply replied “Because killing once is never enough.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: Dying

His body was burnt and charred, blackened and broken beyond repair. It couldn’t be helped. This was the price he paid for the pleasure he received from the pain, rivalled only by the joy of watching yet another family of useless expendable mortals being torn apart and destroyed one by one. It was just a shame he’d spent so much time working on the design and gathering the materials required to create such a perfect body, only for it to be ruined in something so simple and so unbelievably human as a fire. Then again, he had all the time in the universe to create a new one.

He’d had this body for a while now, but this was the first time he’d really tested it out. This was the first time he’d tried pushing its limits and he had certainly learned his lesson - well, almost; there was no doubt in his mind that he’d do it again, if only for the fun of feeling himself burn. For now, he had to say goodbye to his pathetically sensitive, smartly-dressed, blond-haired human body and return to his original form. But even without physically existing within the burning building, he was still able to sit back and watch the annihilation of the group of mortals he was hell bent on eradicating that evening.

A woman in her mid-thirties with dark hair to match her dark eyes and soft features that gave the impression of a gentle soul was screaming as she ran along the hallway and banged on the door of the bedroom in which her two children were sleeping. She wasn’t as sweet and innocent as everyone thought she was. None of them were. He was the only one who knew. He knew this because he was Bill Cipher and Bill Cipher knew everything.

Infinite knowledge came with a heavy burden. Infinite boredom. There was very little that could keep him entertained for long, and one of those few activities he didn’t find entirely mind numbingly dull was murder. The heartbreak it brought, the chaos it resulted in… That was something he’d never get tired of.

The woman’s husband was trapped in his own room, the one he shared with his wife. The flames were right outside the door. Every time he put his hand on the door handle, intending to open it, he let go and jumped back immediately, feeling the heat of the fire approach him. He spun round and flung himself towards the window, opened it and glanced down at the concrete below. Bill could see already he was never going to jump. He didn’t have the guts. The events that followed didn’t come as a surprise to him at all.

First he yelled to his wife but she didn’t respond. He called her name a few more times, banging his fist against the wall separating their bedroom and the bathroom, hoping she’d hear him but she didn’t. The roar of the fire combined with the screech of her own screaming voice created a sound too loud to hear anything else over. That’s when the tragedy happened - the tragedy that Bill Cipher had been looking forward to witnessing. He slowed time down at will when it began, just so he could relish in the human’s suffering even more. Tripping in his rush to find something he could use to climb out of the window, the black-haired man (the only one in the family, Bill noted) tumbled to the floor, hitting his head hard on the sharp corner of the bedpost. If Bill had still had a mouth, he would have been grinning.

Unfortunately, he didn’t have such good luck with the other three members of the family, particularly the children. Mabel Pines, his main target - the one he’d intended to kill that night while the rest of the family’s minds crumbled as a consequence of the original killing - had been awoken by her twin brother, who was currently hurrying to help her out of the room. The two of them managed without difficulty to get out of their bedroom, but the fire was approaching them with considerable speed from downstairs, creeping up to the first floor of the house via the stairs, thus blocking their initially intended exit.

Recognising the fact that they were being cut off by the flames, they ducked back into their own room, leaving their mother on the landing, who managed to escape into the bathroom with the aim of getting out through the window. She trusted in her son’s ability to aid in both his sister’s and his own escape.

She was right to do so. By emptying their wardrobes and every drawer in the room and tying every item of clothing (along with a few blankets and bedsheets) together, he created a piece of fabric strong enough and long enough to allow Mabel to successfully climb out of the window in their bedroom and safely reach the ground. But before he could do the same, Bill decided not to let him get off so lightly. He was ruining his plans after all.

“You’re not getting away from me that easily, kid,” he laughed manically as he materialised in front of the window, blocking the child’s path and freezing time as he did so. He was almost instantly bored by the child’s shocked expression. It was always the same. Every time he revealed himself to a new mortal, their response was always exactly the same. So just as the eleven year old opened his mouth to speak, he cut him off with a sigh and rolled his eye. “You’d think you’d never seen a one-eyed triangular dream demon before,” he mocked, a glimmer of malice flashing in his eye.

“I haven’t,” the human spluttered, glancing anxiously towards the window.

“Yeah, I know. I see everything. I’d know if you’d met me before.” Human children were stupid, Bill concluded. But that wasn’t why he’d decided to show himself. If he wasn’t going to kill his sister, he wasn’t going to let the brother get away without a scar or two, and he found that the worst scars were the emotional kind. “Let me show you something. Come with me.” He held out his hand and when the child refused to take it, he grabbed hold of his wrist and disappeared, reappearing a moment later with the child in another room altogether - in his parents’ room.

The child’s father was lying on the carpeted floor, his hair matt with blood as the red seeped out from a wound on the back of his head and strongly contrasted with the pure white of the soft carpet. “Ever seen someone die before?” the demon asked with a hint of cruel delight in his voice. The child tried to move away from him but he held him back - not by holding onto him, but with magic - creating a barrier around the bleeding body in the middle of the room. “It doesn’t look to good for the rest of them either,” he added nonchalantly, despite being well aware that physically - and at least for the time being - the child’s mother and sister would be perfectly fine.

“Why are you doing this?” the human sobbed, trying his best to keep his voice steady but ultimately failing. 

Bill saw his lip tremble and would have smirked if his body hadn’t been destroyed already. “Because killing once is never enough.”

Once he was sure the black-haired man with blood smeared across the back of his head was dead - or at least beyond the point where he would benefit from medical help - he teleported the child to safety (whilst keeping away from his original target to ensure she remained oblivious to his existence) and vanished, leaving him to stand there, alone outside in the dark with the demon’s final words echoing in his mind over and over again.

In spite of his failure - Mabel Pines was still alive, after all - Bill consider this a job well done. The family had not escaped without suffering a loss that night - even if the loss did take a different form than Bill had planned it to - and at least one of the children would be haunted by the sight of his dying father hopefully for the rest of his life. This is what was going to tear the family apart. Mabel had gotten away unscathed, but Bill trusted that her brother would gradually unpick her sanity unknowingly. And as for their mother… She’d lost a husband and would never get over an intense newfound fear of fire. She was still alive but Bill didn’t mind. She was dying anyway.


	2. Mangled

This tragedy is what brought the twins to Gravity Falls. Their mother didn’t come with them. She stayed in hospital, where she’d been since the fire, while the two children were sent away to live with their great uncle Stan for the summer - at least, they were told it was just for the summer, but Bill knew otherwise. 

During the incident, her plan to escape via the bathroom window hadn’t worked and she’d ended up being knocked unconscious, just as her husband had. She was luckier than him, however, and - much to the demon’s dismay - had been spotted by a fireman and rescued. She didn’t get away unscathed, though her burns were light and easily treated. Her mind took the brunt of the blow. All three survivors were taken to hospital that night, but only two of them were allowed to leave in the morning. Once her physical injuries had been treated, she was transferred to the mental health ward and eventually diagnosed with severe depression.

She barely spoke anymore. The hospital arranged childcare for her but she had to pay for it herself and couldn’t afford more than a couple of weeks, hence her decision to send them to Gravity Falls. Stan wouldn’t be the best guardian and she was aware of that, but nobody else was returning her calls. He was reckless and a well-known conman (well-known at least within the family) but even she realised he was more capable than she was at the moment.

They didn’t want to leave. 

The lower level of their house had been almost completely destroyed in the fire, so they didn’t have many belongings by the time it came to pack their cases (by which point Mabel had warmed to the idea of going away, whereas Dipper remained detached). Mabel packed almost everything she owned (that hadn’t been ruined) and chatted excitedly to her brother whilst they packed their bags. He, on the other hand, kept quiet throughout most of their extremely one-sided conversation and only took one suitcase with him. That case contained only a handful of belongings: clean clothes, books, a notepad and pencil that never left him, a book of puzzles and a toothbrush. 

Mabel said he was boring. He said he was practical. Bill didn’t care either way, as long as he suffered, and he had every intention of making sure that he did.

The day they said goodbye to their mother was, as far as Bill Cipher was concerned, the last day they would ever set eyes on her. Maybe she’d go mad and kill herself. Maybe the kids would, too. That wouldn’t be an unreasonable response to all the sudden changes in their surroundings. The boy was going to go first. That much was obvious. After witnessing his father’s dead, saving his sister but being unable to help his mother in the middle of a crisis, and finally, having a demon invade his mind and tell him so, he was bound to go insane sooner or later. The girl would follow. She always did.

But Bill had no intention of letting his mind slip too quickly. He couldn’t let it all be over so soon - not while he was having so much fun.

The boy’s name was Dipper (that wasn’t his real name, but it was what everybody had called him ever since he was a baby so it might as well have been). Bill watched him every day. And every night too. He often told people he was always watching, but this was the first time he was really concentrating on a mortal all the time. Of course, he was still keeping an eye on the rest of the world simultaneously, but Dipper was the one he focused on the most.

He was interesting. That was the long and short of it. Everything the child did intrigued or amused Bill in some way. The way he grew tired of idle chatter and longed for deeper discussions, how inquisitive he was and how he turned to books and did his own research to find the answers to his questions instead of just asking, the way he did everything neatly and was always remarkably organised… In that respect he was the exact opposite of Bill, but the demon believed he could convert the child’s order into chaos without putting too much effort into it. After all, mortals were easy to manipulate, especially the children - though he suspected this child in particular may be a bit more of challenge.

He was always up for a challenge. So was Dipper. That was just another item on the demon’s ever-growing list of things he liked about the human.

The one thing he didn’t like about him was how much faith he put in his twin sister. Anyone who knew the demon would have guessed he preferred Mabel to her brother because of her wild imagination, when in actual fact this couldn’t have been further from the truth. Creativity was boring. That was simply because he was so incredibly creative. It just wasn’t different enough. Dipper was different. Mabel was a nuisance. She was expendable. He wasn’t.

When the two of them arrived at Gravity Falls, Bill was busy fashioning himself a new body - identical to the old one, but new all the same - solely for the purpose of speeding up the destruction of Dipper’s mind ever so slightly. It was a lot of trouble to go to but he was sure it’d be worth it. Even if it wasn’t, he’d use the body again another time anyway.  
Their uncle Stan - Grunkle Stan, as they called him - greeted them at the bus stop when they arrived. He didn’t look particularly happy to see them. Then again, the only time he did look particularly happy was when someone was giving him money, and the twins didn’t have any with them; the small amounts of pocket money they had had before they had lost to the fire, so now they were essentially penniless. Bill thought he’d make a much better guardian than Stan. Of course, he’d kill Mabel off straight away and keep Dipper to himself, but he’d take care of Dipper better than anyone else would.

And he could barely comprehend why.

He hadn’t appeared in any of the boy’s dreams; he hadn’t shown himself to him since the night of the fire. He was waiting. He was waiting for the perfect moment, for his mentality to begin crumbling just a bit more. The boy was already fragile, but not fragile enough. The two children were both starting to break, both at the same speed which was surprising seeing as Dipper was the one who had witnessed the death of the man he called “dad”. They were bound to be upset and the woman who had been looking after them until they were set off to live with Grunkle Stan recognised this, though no-one knew just how damaged they were. No-one except Bill.

They were both too good at hiding their injuries - Mabel through her feigned grins and confidence, and Dipper through his lack of complaining and silence. The boy had always been quiet and his sister had always been loud. All they had to do was stay exactly the same and nobody would ever know the difference. He didn’t say anything on those few occasions when he saw the light in her eyes die and her bright smile fade for a second. She didn’t say anything to him when she caught him crying on his own in the corner of the room.

Bill had never really cared when he’d seen a human cry before. He’d never cried himself, so he couldn’t imagine what it felt like. He knew what sadness was and he what grief was, but what he didn’t know was precisely how either of those emotions felt. He had limited experience with them. Anger and contentedness were the ones he understood most. Anger he felt whenever one of his associates disobeyed him or when a mortal got in his way; contentedness he felt the rest of the time.

So when Dipper cried quietly to himself in the corner of the attic one night - getting progressively louder with each sob - he couldn’t understand why the sobbing boy on the floor of the Mystery Shack had caught his attention. He contemplated appearing in front of him, invading his mind again and talking to him - perhaps in attempt to soothe the weeping child - but quickly decided against it. He was a demon. Demons didn’t soothe weeping children - they caused them to weep. It just wasn’t done.

But a part of him wished that it was.

At one point, Dipper screamed at himself and fell forward, crashing his face into the wooden floorboards half-deliberately. Amazingly, his sister snored through it. She was good at that. He stood up after a moment and stumbled into bed, too upset to get changed into his nightclothes. He just wanted to sleep. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to wake up in the morning.

Sleep didn’t come. He stayed awake all night and cried through most of it, but by the end he’d seemed to have run out of tears and managed to entertain himself by reading. Bill almost felt sorry for him. He knew what it was like to be alone, even though Dipper wasn’t really on his own - he had Mabel. Bill had no-one. He also had everyone. It confused even him.

Finally, when morning came, the child fell asleep with his half-open book spread across his chest. Then, for the first time in the last few days, the nightmares returned. The demon thought about stopping it. He could have intervened if he’d cared enough. But he couldn’t allow his reputation amongst his associates to be defiled on account of some human kid he’d taken a liking to. Besides, he was the one who’d ordered for the boy to be tormented in his sleep. How would it look if he took it back?

For the majority of the dream, Dipper appeared not to be fazed. The sight of blood no longer bothered him, especially if it was his own. Only Bill was aware that Mabel was his weakness - if anything happened to her, his sanity would shatter instantly. But he wasn’t about to share that information with anybody and he doubted he’d ever use himself. None of what he saw in the first part of the dream was the reason why Dipper woke up shaking and with his mind in tatters.

Towards the end of the dream, he saw himself. It was a self he barely recognised - one that he certainly didn’t want to recognise. His body was lying in a ditch, charred from head to toe, limbs twisted and splayed out at unnatural angles. Mangled. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from it, but the more he stared down at his blackened, mangled body, the more it distorted itself. Its burnt skin began peeling away and dissolving into nothingness, revealing the bone beneath it and eventually disappearing altogether, leaving nothing but a skeleton that he’d rather not have been looking at.

When he woke up in a cold sweat, his mind screaming at him but his throat unable to voice his distress, Bill’s sympathy for him only intensified. And if he’d had a heart, it would have gone out to him.


	3. Genocide

Days and nights passed and the nightmares grew worse, the days becoming more and more insufferable with each exchange of positions between the sun and the moon, until one evening the demon watching over him finally put his foot down. It was by no means Dipper’s fault that everything was making him want to scream. It was his mother’s. And in a way, it was also Bill’s. That’s why he eventually put his foot down - partly, anyway. But if Mrs Pines had been stronger, her children wouldn’t have had to be strong for her. And if Bill Cipher hadn’t put his reputation before the human child he found so intriguing, he would never have learned what compassion was.

Sometimes the days were even worse than the nights, because he still had to work in his great uncle’s tourist trap despite getting little to no sleep the night before. Because he had nothing to do but work on whatever jobs Stan wanted him to do, which were always the ones Stan never wanted to do himself. Because he had to pretend to smile for the sake of the customers and because he couldn’t let himself cry in front of anyone. Because he wasn’t allowed to mention his father’s death or his mother’s dark descent into depression and madness or the dream demon shaped like a triangle with only one eye and no other facial features.

His hunger for mystery went unsatisfied. His thirst for adventure went unquenched. Bill had the power to change that. He also had the power to soothe the child’s nightmares and lull him to sleep even though he was fighting against it, but he told himself not to bother. He told himself not to get too attached to the practical boy who found things out for himself instead of relying on everyone else because that boy was dying. The boy who read and read until his fingers were littered with papercuts for all the times he’d turned the pages of his current favourite mystery novel had already started to fade. That boy would soon cease to exist, and in his place would emerge the boy who was too afraid to sleep and who watched the shadows carefully each night out of fear for himself and his sister.

The monsters plaguing his nightmares were starting to get to know his greatest fears and darkest secrets, using this knowledge to manipulate his thoughts while he was in the dreamscape and to show him the images that would terrify him the most. The dreams now included less blood and more exposed bone and twisted skeletons - ones with skulls that rotated slowly by themselves and hollow eye sockets that seemed to stare right into his eyes. The knowledge that Mabel was his greatest weakness remained exclusive to Bill and the demon was glad of that.

The child’s decline from happiness and stability was not as rapid as Bill had hoped, however, and the demon soon decided that he needed to step in. This wasn’t for the child’s sake, but for his, he insisted to himself. Dipper’s wellbeing wasn’t what was important. But the child’s endless feelings of emptiness and sorrow were beginning to get old. Bill needed change. He needed excitement. He needed… madness, and for discord and anarchy to reign over the child’s mind.

This is why he, for the first time since the night of the fire that had ripped the boy’s family apart, decided to take action and appear in front of him, aiming to not only prevent the boy from taking his own life before his time was up (according to Bill’s vision for him), but also to nudge him in the right direction - the direction of chaos and insanity.

It wouldn’t take long - not long at all as far he was concerned. His body wasn’t quite ready yet, although preparations for his return to the physical world were well underway, but it could wait. Keeping the human child in exactly the mental condition he deemed suitable was more important for the time being. And so, as Dipper sat there, crying quietly to himself in the corner of the living room, alone as he so often was, he appeared to him, freezing time and depleting the world of its colour as a flash of white light erupted before the child.

The reaction he was greeted with was nothing compared to what he’d been expecting. In usual circumstances, when he appeared to someone after first revealing to them the murderous nature of his personality, he was met with hate and fury, as well as terror. This time, however, the reaction he received was surprisingly subdued.

Dipper raised his head, blinked at him, and then lowered his head again, fixing his gaze on the floor. If he’d had eyebrows, Bill would have raised one. It was as if he hadn’t seen him even though he was floating in mid-air right in front of him. So he decided to make his presence known for definite by moving closer to the boy and waving his hands in front of his face. When that didn’t work, he spoke in his usual loud, shrill voice that sounded a lot more like shouting than speaking.

“Pine Tree, this is insulting.” Dipper’s head jerked back at the sound of his voice and his eyes widened. Maybe he hadn’t really noticed he was there before. “You know very well who I am. Don’t tell me you don’t recognise me.” Dipper stared back at him blankly, a vacant look in his eyes, and stayed silent. He wasn’t sure that what he was experiencing was real. One look into the human’s mind revealed to Bill that he didn’t believe the demon’s existence was part of reality. He thought, in spite of how real it felt, that he was a figment of his imagination. This wasn’t especially surprising, but he had expected more of this human in particular and he told him so. “I expected better of you, kid. You’re not like the others. You’ve got brains. You’re smart enough to have already ruined my plans, and I’m not gonna let you get away with it, you hear me, kid?”

“Go on, then,” the boy muttered, lowering his head again in submission. “You like killing, don’t you? Whatever you are, just do it. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

This wasn’t right. This wasn’t the boy he’d been keeping an eye on since the incident. This wasn’t how he was supposed to act. It was all just so wrong.

Moving backwards slightly, but still staying too close for Dipper’s liking, Bill paused and kept quiet, observing him in silence. His legs dangled from his triangular form at unnatural angles, his arms folded across his front and brushing against his bowtie. He narrowed his eye as he watched, irritated by the boy’s disappointing reaction to his appearance and concerned that his descent into madness and melancholy was happening faster than he’d wanted it to - much faster.

Dipper wasn’t even paying attention to him anymore. He was curled up, leaning back against the wall behind him, hugging his knees to his chest and burying his face in his hands, quietly sobbing. There was fear in his sobs; Bill could sense it. He could see into his mind and see it crumbling. He could see every doubt he had about what was real and what he was imagining. That wasn’t the fear Bill had wanted. He’d wanted him to afraid of him, not of himself. He’d wanted terror, horror and distress at the knowledge that he could be destroyed so easily by the monster that had torn his family apart. He didn’t want this.

“I’m not going to kill you, kid,” he said indignantly. Killing him would have been too easy, too kind, too merciful. Bill didn’t do mercy. He was going to punish him - for wrecking his plans, for protecting his sister and then for diving into a deep depression for so long he was beginning to grow tired of it - and he was going to punish slowly, cruelly, so maliciously that Bill wouldn’t be able to stop laughing. He would punish him, and he would savour every long, drawn out second of it.

His eye curled up to form a grin and Dipper looked up at him now, eyes dulled and filled with despair and desperation. Bill simply laughed in response. The boy’s cheeks were red and tear-stained, and he longed to wipe one of his tears away and taste it. Or maybe just keep it. They were mesmerising, whatever they were, and glistened in the light the demon’s golden form was projecting.

“Why?” was Dipper’s reply. It made sense, really. It was a perfectly rational response. Bill despised the rational. But he’d change the boy’s mind soon enough. He’d destroy it; he’d turn his mind upside down like he had done to his plans. It was the greatest pleasure Bill could ever imagine, taking someone’s neat and orderly mind and reducing it to pure discord. Slaughtering sanity, a genocide of reason. “Why?” Dipper repeated, his voice weaker than before.

It took Bill a moment to decide on an answer. It took him a moment to decide to lie. “Because you don’t really want to die, Pine Tree. It will get better. You don’t really want me to kill you, even though that would be fun for me.” He stared hard at the boy and the boy stared back at him, sniffed, and wiped his tears away. Bill scowled as best as he could with the few facial features he had, frustrated that he hadn’t been able to keep even one single tear as he’d wished to. But there would be plenty more where they came from, he supposed - plenty more opportunities to get his way.

Dipper seemed to disregard the mention that killing him would be considered fun, but he fixated on the idea that somehow he’d eventually feel better - that somehow he wouldn’t feel like he was falling apart. “Will it really? Get better, I mean? How do you know that?” Bill just shrugged, not a word leaving his mouthless form. “Are you lying?”

“No, I’m not,” the demon snapped - too quickly - and laughed to ease some of the tension emulating from the boy curled up in the corner. “And I’m not telling you anything about the future, kid. Even demons have rules, you know.” He stopped, eyeing the brunette for a moment or so - he was shaking, uncertainty consuming him, but his dark eyes had brightened only slightly, curiosity returning to them. Bill almost warned him that curiosity killed the cat, and it would probably kill him too if he let it get the better of him, but stopped himself just in time.

“But I will tell you this. There’s a journal hidden somewhere in the woods.” He gestured to the enormous cluster of trees outside the window, grinning again. “Find it, and everything will start to look up for you. Your life will have a new purpose - not that it had one in the first place.”

Turning his head, Dipper gazed out of the window to the forest the demon was pointing to. “But… There are so many… It’ll take forever to find it.”

“Better get a move on then,” Bill practically cackled. “Bye for now, kid. I trust I’ll be seeing you again pretty soon. And until then, I’ll be keeping an eye on you.” His eye flashed scarlet and the boy ducked out of the way as he lurched forwards but was ultimately unable to escape as Bill’s hand came down on the top of his head, fingers entangling themselves in his hair and knocking off his cap in the process. And then, with a click of his fingers, the world regained its colour and the demon disappeared, but he was still watching. He watched as Dipper wasted no time in running off into the woods, so eager to do as Bill had suggested.

Back in his own world, Bill sat back in his colossal silver throne and smile to himself with pride, knowing that he’d accomplished just what he’d set out to do - knowing that soon enough, his attack of Dipper’s mind would be well underway.


End file.
